Bruce
Harvie
Mandolin Graffiti
bruceharvie.com
When I grow up I want to be just like Bruce
Harvie.
I want to live on a beautiful island in
Puget Sound and learn all about various kinds of trees, so I can operate
a business selling tonewoods
to people who build beautiful musical instruments. I want to have a
fantastic collection of such instruments, some of which were made from
the very woods I sold to the builders. I want to become very good at
playing those instruments and make friends with a lot of other talented
musicians. I want to know all about vintage microphones and recording
gear and build my own studio so I can show off my instrument collection
on my own CD, and call it Mandolin Graffiti. I want to save money
by burning the CDs myself and putting all the artwork
and liner
notes online where people can download them, so I can sell
the disc for only $10 instead of $15. I want to be a gifted
composer/arranger, so I can fill the CD with exciting tunes and unusual
groupings of instruments—mostly played by me—that really catch the
ears of my audience. I want to name these tunes after graffiti that I've
seen "tagged" onto chlorine-tank rail cars. Even if only a
couple of cuts on the CD feature an electric mandolin, I want the music
to be so refreshing that it's eminently worthy of a review on a Web site
such as this one.
But alas, Bruce has beaten me to every one
of those goals, and the result is one of the most enjoyable, unusual CDs
I've heard in a long time. Here the entire flock of mandolin-family
instruments (minus the mandobass) is heard alongside not just guitars
and fiddles, but a whole assortment of odd instruments, both foreign (angklung,
kabosy, kalimba) and domestic (bass harmonica, jew's harp, chamberlin,
pump organ, lap steel). Bruce's mandolins represent the absolute cream
of the luthiery crop: Stephen Gilchrist, John Monteleone, Paul Duff, and
Lawrence Smart, to name a few. Of course we're primarily interested in
his John Sullivan electric
mandolin and Fatdog electric
mandocello, which appear on one track each.
You might swear Bruce is playing electric
on "White Lightning," the rockabilly number that opens the
disc, but he isn't; it's his Monteleone acoustic. He plays it loud
enough to overdrive the microphone and runs the results through a
wah-wah pedal for a funky rhythm line. From these
energetic beginnings, Bruce settles into a decidedly midtempo feel for
the next four tunes, offering extended, laid-back solos on everything
from the aforementioned Monteleone to a Duff mandocello, backed by the
oddest pairings of instruments imaginable: Indonesian angklung and pump
organ on "Pulse," lap steel and chamberlin on
"daze," kabosies and bass harmonica on "Hub." Igor
Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, George Martin—they
all had a flair for unusual combinations of instruments, but Bruce just
might be a match for any of them. Not content to merely overwhelm
you with his creativity, he takes time on these tracks to develop
fantastic melodies and build the musical texture layer by layer.
On the next two numbers, the tempo picks up a bit.
You might expect "Kentucky Waterfall" to be a bluegrass
hornpipe, but it turns out instead to be a ragtime-flavored piece—actually,
technically it's a "cakewalk." "Pet Rock," however,
sounds pretty much like you'd expect, if indeed it's possible to know
what to expect from Bruce. Here the Sullivan electric mandolin finally
surfaces, pumped through a wah-wah pedal and a Vox amp and paired with
some gutsy fiddling courtesy of Jon Parry. On "Slime," the
closer, Bruce's Fatdog electric mandocello makes an appearance, playing
a plaintive slide figure that struggles to be heard above a menacing
E-Bowed bass line that's been souped up by recording it in an abandoned
grain silo. This is a pretty disconcerting way to end a CD, but your
patience will be rewarded with the hidden track: a honky-tonk-from-outer-space
take on Bill Monroe's "Tennessee Blues" that should leave you
with a smile.
I hesitate to
use the phrase "You've never heard anything like this before,"
because it's so seldom true. But in this case, Bruce just might have
created the Sgt. Pepper's–meets–Le
Sacre du Printemps of mandolin music. If you haven't already done
so, I'd strongly recommend checking it out before he gets around to
releasing the White Album–meets–Petrouchka of mandolin
music.
Overall:
Emando content:
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